Crafted from the melted-down weapons of defeated Persians in about 479 BCE, the Serpent Column is an ancient Greek war monument and offering to Apollo. It served as part of a sacrificial tripod at Delphi before being moved to the Hippodrome of Constantinople in the 4th century CE. Over the past 2,500 years, the artifact has been frequently referenced in literature and depicted in art. Today just a twisted column, it originally depicted three intertwined snakes. What happened to their heads?More...

Rader was a city employee, married father of two, Boy Scout leader, and an active churchgoer—and a serial killer. From 1974 to 1991, he killed 10 people in and around Wichita, Kansas. In 2004, after years of silence, he resumed taunting police and local media with letters describing the murders. In February 2005, police used information on a floppy disk he had sent them to locate and arrest him. He pled guilty that June. Five days after his arrest, he was fired from his job—for what?More...

Born in Greece and educated in Ireland, Hearn immigrated to the US at age 19 and lived in poverty for a time until he found employment as a journalist. He was a colorful but morbidly discontented man, admired for his highly polished tales of the macabre. In 1890, a magazine sent him to Japan, where he married a Japanese woman, took a Japanese name, and became a citizen. His subsequent books offered the West its first thoughtful view of Japanese culture. What partial disability did he have?More...

It is not uncommon for young children with food allergies to be exposed to those foods at some point and suffer an allergic reaction as a result. In fact, a study of infants with known or suspected allergies to milk or egg found that nearly three-quarters had an allergic reaction during the study period. When this happens and a child experiences a severe reaction, caregivers must act quickly to administer a potentially life-saving dose of epinephrine. Yet, in about a third of the cases in this study, caregivers failed to do so, suggesting that more must be done to educate them about the use of epinephrine.More...

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